NBC News

Good morning. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Here are 10 media stories.

Janay Rice as-told-to piece may reverberate for ESPN

But not because the network let her approve the piece's content. Janay Rice says her husband, disgraced football player Ray Rice, told NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell everything that happened in that now-famous elevator. Goodell later said he didn't know what happened. ESPN personality Bill Simmons called Goodell a liar in a podcast and ESPN suspended him. "Janay Rice’s first-person account makes that particular suspension look weak." (WP)

U.S. Supreme Court will hear case about online threats today

Good rundown about Elonis v. United States from Jeff John Roberts. (GigaOm) | Lyle Denniston's explainer. (SCOTUSblog) | The blog Racists Getting Fired connects people's work information to their online comments.

Remembering Ben Bradlee on Twitter: Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post’s incoming nonfiction book critic, began tweeting passages from Ben Bradlee‘s memoir, “A Good Life,” after the former Post executive editor died Tuesday. (@CarlosLozadaWP) | 196 or so tweets later, here’s a selection: “It would be ungrateful of me not to pause here and acknowledge the role of Richard Milhouse Nixon in furthering my career.” (@CarlosLozadaWP) | “Make no mistake about it: there is only one thing an editor must have to be a good editor, and that is a good owner.” (@CarlosLozadaWP) | “When a job candidate came in with good clips but was soft spoken and reticent, #Bradlee’s verdict: ‘Ehhh.

Freed Simmons: ESPN’s Bill Simmons returns to the network today after his three-week suspension “for calling N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell a ‘liar’ during a podcast, and then effectively daring ESPN to punish him.” His contract expires next fall, Jonathan Mahler and Richard Sandomir report. Will he leave? (New York Times) | Deadspin would take him. (Deadspin) | Previously: At the time of the suspension, Kelly McBride wrote, “when your biggest star declares himself above his newsroom’s standards, the boss has to respond.” (Poynter)

Lawsuit over Newsweek’s Bitcoin story? The man who Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman identified as the founder of Bitcoin is raising money on a website to sue the magazine, claiming he was “targeted and victimized by a reckless news organization.” Dorian Nakamoto has been unemployed for 10 years, the site says. “Donations, obviously, can be made by bitcoin.” (TechCrunch) | Previously: In March, Nakamoto told the AP he hadn’t heard of Bitcoin until his son told him about it after talking to Newsweek: “I got nothing to do with it.” (Poynter)

Snyderman sorry for violating Ebola quarantine: The 21-day quarantine for NBC News crew members who traveled to Liberia is now mandatory after Dr. Nancy Snyderman violated the voluntary quarantine.

Vivian Schiller’s exit could signal tension for Twitter and journalists: Adam Sharp, who is in charge of government partnerships, will return to heading news partnerships as well. (Re/code) | “That puts him in an oddly conflicted position of advising government officials who are seeking to influence public opinion and journalists who are trying to get past that manipulation and explain what they see as the real story.” (NYT)

NBC wanted Jon Stewart for “Meet the Press”: “They were ready to back the Brink’s truck up,” a source tells Gabriel Sherman. (New York) | “The revelation also underscored just how seriously [NBC News President Deborah] Turness thought about blowing up “Meet the Press,” which has fallen from first to third place in the Sunday morning political show ratings.” (CNN) | “If it’s Sunday, it’s your moment of zen.” (@chucktodd)

Readers have always lied about what kinds of stories they like: “We were always ‘Facebook readers’ long before there was a Facebook.” (The Atlantic) | RELATED: Kara Swisher says, “I still think the old media hates the Internet and hopes it will go away.” (Vanity Fair)

Free Press designer dies: 25-year veteran Steve Anderson was 59. Remembers Amy Huschka, assistant editor/social media: “He was so proud of his Twitter account and loved sharing historic images and daily 1A’s with his followers.” From Jason Karas, a designer and colleague: “He cared about every single word, every comma, every period that he placed on a 1A.” (Detroit Free Press) | A collection of memorable front pages designed by Anderson. (Detroit Free Press) | A Storify of Anderson’s tweets that anyone who loves newspaper design should check out. (Storify)

Freelance cameraman contracts Ebola: The unidentified man was working for NBC News on a team in Liberia with medical correspondent Dr.

American journalist freed in Syria: On Sunday, UN peacekeepers received Peter Theo Curtis, who was kidnapped in 2012, and turned him over to the U.S. “According to German newspaper die Welt am Sonntag, ‘something was given in return for his release’.” Curtis was “reportedly held by the al-Nusra Front or by splinter groups allied with the al-Qaeda-affiliated group.” (Al Jazeera) | Previously: The U.S. declined to pay ransom for James Foley, who was killed by Islamic State militants last week. (Poynter)

UK intel ID’s person believed to be Foley’s killer: And “sources have said that rampant media speculation about the identity of the killer may be off base.” (NBC News) | Medill professor Ellen Shearer on Foley’s return to the front lines: “Passion prevailed.

Good morning. Liev Schreiber will reportedly play Marty Baron in a movie. I am tempted to end this roundup right now, but just in case you want to know more about the U.S. media landscape this morning, here are 10 more stories.

Reporters who are covering the Michael Brown story in Ferguson, Missouri: Kristen Hare has started a list and compiled tweets from local media. (Poynter) | A St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter was “slugged from behind and helped away by police officers” Sunday in an area of Ferguson where looting occurred. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) | Monday’s Post-Dispatch front page: “Day of Protests”/”Night of Frenzy” (via Newseum)

Also:

Dear national news outlets it's insulting to ask to use my photos "for credit" I'm a professional

Buncha moves at BuzzFeed: Concurrent with an announcement of $50 million funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the publisher will: 1) Split its news division into three groups, News, Buzz and Life (featuring a test kitchen); 2) launch BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, which will “focus on all moving images from a GIF to feature film”; 3) launch a division that will make content for platforms like Snapchat, Imgur and Vine.

Score one for those [Digiday] who [Nieman Lab] bemoan [Poynter] the rampant mobile-fication of news site designs on desktop.

NBC News has redesigned the image-heavy homepage layout that drew more than 100 angry comments to Poynter in February — and more than 300 supporters to a Change.org petition to “Reinstate a content-rich, word-navigated NBCnews.com site design.”

According to audience surveys and data obtained through the use of a test site, preview.nbcnews.com, NBC News determined what its desktop readership wanted: “The audience was looking for a faster homepage, for more scannable headlines, and for greater density,” said Gregory Gittrich, executive editor of NBCNews.com.

(That meshes with the barrage of complaints I received after writing about the February redesign. One opined, “I guess reading text is second-rate these days. Read more